In less than a month’s time, on July 25th, there’ll be a by-election in Ward 2 Etobicoke North to pick the successor to the late Rob Ford.

I know, right? Pretty much slipped my mind too. What with all the other news going on. Transit madness. Budget talk. The official start of summer, lazy, hazy days. Who’s got the time or inclination to wrap their head around a by-election right now?

Besides, the general consensus seems to be, Michael Ford, nephew of the last two Ward 2 city councillors, will take this in a cakewalk. Name recognition. A brand loyalty from voters. It’s a summer by-election. So low voter turnout will compound the advantage of an established candidate. Why waste resources fighting a no-win battle?

Why indeed.

I am hopelessly naïve on many aspects of politics, never more so than campaign politics.

I would’ve thought this to be a perfect opportunity to plant a non-Ford flag in Ward 2. It’s the only council election going (as opposed to the general municipal campaign where there are 44 wards and a mayor’s race to contend with). Marshall the forces. Get behind a candidate. Challenge these Ford dynastic aspirations.

Sure, you might not win. In fact, you probably won’t. Although, this notion of invincibility doesn’t entirely jibe with the 2014 election results that saw a former mayor and 4 time Ward 2 councillor enter the race, under the sympathetic shadow of illness, and only pull in 58% of the popular vote. That meant 42% of Ward 2 voters didn’t vote for Rob Ford last time out. Seems like a base that could be worked with this time around.

But Michael Ford’s a nice kid, I hear. He’s expressed nice sentiments to a community his uncle actively disliked and maligned. Give him a chance to prove he’s better than either of his uncles.

So, in fact, it’s more of a coronation than an election. Michael Ford isn’t forced to do anything but knock on doors and issue press releases like this one about the KPMG’s Revenue Options Study.

Ward 2 residents can’t afford billions of dollars in costly new taxes; I have heard this message loud and clear at the door. While I support investment in the City’s housing and transit infrastructure, additional work must be done to find internal savings and efficiencies, and leverage private investment, before we ask taxpayers for even more of their hard earned money.

Sound familiar? Yeah, to me too. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, issues statements that both his uncles would …

What gets me most about this, by-election or not, is that it represents something of a pattern I noticed going back to the 2014 municipal election. I worked a little on a campaign in Etobicoke, wrote about a number of suburban candidates. These were races that, for the most part, pretty much operated under the radar. No one news organization has the resources to cover 45 races, no matter how long a campaign may be. So these candidates in the wilderness wards are pretty much left to their own devices, left to dangle, making them even more susceptible to being steamrolled by the power of incumbency and other hyper-local forces.

Then we sit back and wonder why all these terrible councillors come down to City Hall from the suburbs. What’s wrong with voters out there? See? This is not our fault. It’s theirs. Just start voting better.

And when the opportunity like this one arises to challenge the status quo in places like Ward 2 – and make no mistake, Michael Ford is the status quo, he represents zero change except perhaps in tone, style – we shrug. What are you going to do? It’s a by-election. It’s summer. Low voter turnout. Name recognition. Why waste resources on fighting a losing battle?

So in waltzes another questionable local representative for the 416 hinterlands, leaving us shaking our heads. There’s a certain self-fulfillment in all that, a self-perpetuation. And the divisions continue.

I’ve heard similar rumblings looking at the mayor’s race in 2018. The mayor’s going to get re-elected. There’s nobody out there to challenge him. We’ll just concentrate on shoring up council support. The mayor is only one vote after all. Why waste our resources on that race?

Freed up of any significant challenger, you’ll have a mayor, all decked out in his inevitability, trying to shape the council even more in his image than it is now. His time and resources spent in wards where he’d really like to see a change of councillor, undermine his opposition. Sure, the mayor is just one vote but he’s made a lot of new council friends now, removed a few thorns in his side.

Maybe this is all too for want of nail from me. It is just a single ward by-election after all. But by constantly ceding ground in areas that you don’t think you can win, it winds up putting you on the defensive, concentrating on maintaining a base that you’re forced to defend rather than attempt to expand, reactive not proactive. Winning campaigns are rarely built like that.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Toronto District School Board Trustee and Nephew, Michael Ford, resigned from the board and announced he was in the running for the late mayor and Ward 2 councillor, Rob Ford’s seat, seemingly moments after city council declared it vacant and voted to hold a July by-election to elect a new councillor. Almost as if they were already prepared to go. Almost as if that was the plan all along, which it was, back in the 2014 municipal election, until Rob Ford stepped out of the mayoral campaign for health reasons, and settled back into the Ward 2 council race. The TDSB trustee position was something of a consolation prize for Nephew Ford.

I had initial reactions to this week’s completely expected turn of events but then, it dawned on me. Here in Ward 20, in 2010, there was a similar if not exact scenario. After long time councillor Joe Pantalone decided to run for mayor, leaving the ward open, a young Mike Layton stepped forward to replace him. You might recognize the surname, not to mention that his famous dad was partnered up with the local sitting Member of Parliament, herself something of a City Hall institution, having represented the ward just one over for 15 years or so.

Truth be told, I did not take to Mike Layton. I resented the political carpetbagging aspect of it, the dynastic sensibility, the passing of the torch. Besides, to my mind, there was a much more qualified candidate, someone who seemed to have spent much more of her time working in the public realm, let’s call it. I did not vote for Mike Layton in 2010.

I did in 2014. Turns outs, he’s an exceptionally good city councillor. So… you know. Michael Ford. It could happen.

People are certainly saying nice things about him. He doesn’t seem to possess the bombastic side of both his uncles. He comes across as soft-spoken, gentle even, legitimately open-minded on some social issues.

Then, there’s his campaign website. “Customer Service”. “Keeping Taxes Low”. Even his “Sustainable Community Investment” is couched in Fordian terms careful spending and within a tight budget framework.

Still.

No rabid dog Subways! Subways! Subways! Light on the Respect For Taxpayers. But not without some coat tailing. “I will continue the benchmark set by my family”.

I guess the idea that Nephew could be a better city councillor than either of his uncles is a step forward. A pretty low threshold, for sure, almost imperceptible on the progress scale. It is, however, the way we measure things in a Mayor John Tory’s Toronto. Oh well, better than X Ford.

Electing Michael Ford as councillor for Ward 2 is not the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing that could happen is some sort of uncontested coronation. Michael Ford cannot be acclaimed as the new councillor. This should never happen at any electoral level, ever, anywhere.

Look, even Rob Ford, who’d served as Ward 2 councillor for 10 years before becoming mayor, only garnered 58% of the popular vote in 2014 when he ran again for the council seat. Yes, no one else came close. Yes, by almost every measure, you could call it a laugher. And yes, the absolutely unqualified Nephew had something of a cakewalk in his trustee race, pulling in about 46% of the votes.

But this is a city council election, the only city council campaign that will be taking place in July, not one of 44, not as part of a mayoral campaign. The summertime spotlight will shine exclusively on the Ward 2 by-election, on Nephew Ford. He must be challenged. The idea that Ward 2 is some sort of family fiefdom needs to be challenged.

In 2014, 42% of Ward 2 voters expressed dissatisfaction with the Ford family brand, and that was with Rob – arguably the brand – flying the colours. Is the Nephew new and improved or is this just a case of Multiplicity, a watered down, reasonable facsimile of a knockoff?

Voters in Ward 2 need to be able to kick the product tires to start to figure that out. That can’t happen if the doors to City Hall are held open for him to just walk through, proclaimed, acclaimed, unchallenged, uncontested. Nephew Ford needs to campaign for the position not simply have it handed to him as some sort of birthright or family heirloom.